TED Community » Robert Hooper

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  A comment on Conversation: What is the true value (if any) of organized schooling?

  Mar 21 2011: Our family has a broad range of educational experience (public, private, homeschool) and we are always looking for ways to expand educational experience. When the children were young we put a large world map on the wall in the dinning room and would constantly refer to it during dinner discussion, as a result my American children have an uncharacteristically strong understanding about world geography. When we traveled, my wife would read aloud books that had themes connected with the particular regional that we were traveling through. These books were not travel books, but literature. We once took an entire vacation to explore the "underground railroad" after reading Uncle Tom's Cabin

• A comment on Conversation: The Khan Academy in using points and badges for rewards is not fostering its main objective to teach mastery of the subject.

  Mar 21 2011: I also find it interesting that it should be pointed out that this discussion that TED uses badges...I just noticing that made me interested in seeing what it took to get one.

• A comment on Conversation: The Khan Academy in using points and badges for rewards is not fostering its main objective to teach mastery of the subject.

  Mar 21 2011: I think people are over simplifying the research on motivation. Extrinsic motivation has been proven to work well on certain things and not others; intrinsic motivation has been shown to work well on certain things and not others. Both types of motivation work, but in different contexts. Badges and awards work well for denoting status and mastery and they have been proven successful in motivating everybody from gamers (World of Warcraft) to high level programmers (see stack overflow.com) This issue is not which is better but what actually works. It is a mistake to assume that learning something new is a reward in itself. It completely depends on how the individual views the task plus the nature of the task itself. Rewarding a student for speed and accuracy in "math facts" works for most people because the task is mechanical, objective and focused. Paying a person in hopes that they will become avid readers will probably have the opposite effect.